Language Log

Today's xkcd:

Mouseover title: "Sure, you could just ask, but this also takes care of the host gift thing."

Unless of course they have Google Home. In which case apparently the thing to do is to ask about the communist coup that Obama is planning…

This has apparently been around for awhile, but I'm seeing it now for the first time:

Here's what you get if you align 11 million words of English-language audiobooks with the associated texts, divide it all into phrases by breaking at silent pauses greater than 150 milliseconds, and average the word durations by position in phrases of lengths from one word to fifteen words:

The audiobook sample in this case comes from LibriSpeech (see Vassil Panayotov et al., "Librispeech: An ASR corpus based on public domain audio books", IEEE ICASSP 2015). Neville Ryant and I have been collecting and analyzing a variety of large-scale speech datasets (see e.g. "Large-scale analysis of Spanish /s/-lenition using audiobooks", ICA 2016; "Automatic Analysis of Phonetic Speech Style Dimensions", Interspeech 2016), and as part of that process, we've refactored and realigned the LibriSpeech sample, resulting in 5,832 English-language audiobook chapters from 2,484 readers, comprising 11,152,378 words of text and about 1,571 hours of audio. (This is a small percentage of the English-language data available from LibriVox, which is somewhere north of 50,000 hours of English audiobook at present.)

People often ask me questions like these:

What's the easiest / hardest language you ever learned?

Isn't Chinese really difficult?

Which is harder, Chinese or Japanese?  Sanskrit or German?

Without a moment's hesitation, I always reply that Mandarin is the easiest spoken language I have learned and that Chinese is the most difficult written language I have learned.  I learned to speak Mandarin fluently within about a year, but I've been studying written Chinese for half a century and it's still an enormous challenge.  I'm sure that I'll never master it even if I live to be as old as Zhou Youguang.

Today's SMBC:

Mouseover title: "New rule: Anyone referring to X as the poetry of Y must have actually ever read a poem."

Not strictly relevant to the Neil deGrasse Tyson discussion, since linguistics is a science and all. But still.

This is a guest post submitted by Nathan Sanders and colleagues. It's the text of an open letter to Neil deGrasse Tyson, who made a comment about linguists on Twitter not long ago.

This is a guest post by Stephen Goranson.

The source of “copasetic,” meaning “fine,” has been sought in Yiddish, Hebrew, Creole French, Italian, Chinook, and in a putative assurance from an accomplice of a thief in the Palmer House Hotel in Chicago that the house “cop’s on the settee.” But, probably, a novelist coined the word. There is good reason to think that Irving Bacheller invented the word for a fictional character with a private vocabulary in his best-selling and later-serialized 1919 book about Abraham Lincoln in Illinois, A Man for the Ages. Despite extensive searches, and conflicting rumors, there is no known earlier attestation.

Fred Vultee, "Pronouns: The Reunion Tour", HeadsUp The Blog, 3/1/2017:

The Fabulous Pronouns are back on the road! Take it away, The Washington Examiner:

President Trump referred to himself during his first speech to a joint session of Congress at a much lower rate than former President Barack Obama did in his first address in February 2009, roughly half as often.

Technically, Donald Trump's speechwriters used 53 first-person-singular pronouns in 4818 words, while Barack Obama's speechwriters used 87 FPS pronouns in 5988 words, so the ratio of rates is (53/4818)/(87/5988) = 0.76 — so it should be "roughly three quarters as often", not "roughly half as often".

I have a German friend who lives amid farmland out east of Edinburgh, and keeps chickens as a hobby. When I visited recently, there was much excitement because one of a clutch of fertile eggs in a small incubator in the living room was beginning to hatch. A tiny beak appeared, and eventually a bedraggled baby bird struggled out and started clambering drunkenly over the shells of its brothers and sisters. Yesterday, after a few weeks had elapsed, my friend wrote to let me know that the tiny creature had been male, and was now an adolescent Cuckoo Maran cockerel. It's the one in the center of the photo he attached:

And as the Subject line for the email enclosing it, he chose… Ah, but I fear that a few of you may be ahead of me, having realized what I'm about to tell you!

Whether you are familiar with Chinese characters or not, try to guess the meaning of the calligraphy on the front of this forthcoming book (the answer is at the very end of this post):

An amusing slip in the Daily Mail (online here), in an opinion piece by Dan Hodges on the decline of the Labour Party and its singularly unsuccessful leader Jeremy Corbyn. Hodges says that "anyone who thinks Labour's problems began on September 12, 2015, when Corbyn was elected, are deluding themselves."

It's unquestionably a grammatical mistake, of course. Not about pronoun choice, but about verb agreement.

While we at Language Log bemoan how often the passive voice is misidentified, and how often passive constructions are wrongly scapegoated, last night's Oscars debacle has provided us with a clearcut case of how agentless passives can serve to obfuscate. The official apology from PricewaterhouseCoopers for the envelope mixup, which led Warren Beatty and Faye Dunaway to announce "La La Land" as Best Picture instead of "Moonlight," reads as follows (emphasis mine):

We sincerely apologize to Moonlight, La La Land, Warren Beatty, Faye Dunaway, and the Oscar viewers for the error that was made during the award announcement for Best Picture. The presenters had mistakenly been given the wrong category envelope and when discovered, was immediately corrected. We are currently investigating how this could have happened, and deeply regret that this occurred.
We appreciate the grace with which the nominees, the Academy, and Jimmy Kimmel handled the situation.

pic.twitter.com/oGJkXytnQ2

— PwC LLP (@PwC_LLP) February 27, 2017